Public barred from joint Pottstown, Pottsgrove sewer meeting

POTTSTOWN — If you live in the borough, or the three surrounding townships that use the borough’s sewer system, the future of your sewer bill was under discussion Tuesday morning — but you would not have been allowed to hear that discussion.

Engineers, managers and lawyers from West Pottsgrove, Upper Pottsgrove and Lower Pottsgrove sat facing each other and representatives of the Pottstown Borough Authority, in a borough hall meeting room Tuesday morning to discuss the townships’ unhappiness with the way they must pay for their share of costs at the Pottstown Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Those payments have had a direct impact on the bills paid by sewer users in those townships.

Currently, all three townships send their sewage to the Pottstown plant under agreements with the Borough Authority.

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But the board that oversees that plant is comprised entirely of Pottstown borough residents.

Lower Pottsgrove Township Manager Rod Hawthorne, who was among those present Tuesday, said the officials want “a seat at the table,” a desire confirmed recently by Upper Pottsgrove Township Manager Jack Layne, himself a former Borough Authority manager.

But the course of that discussion, the arguments made, the facts stated and the potential costs — or savings — is not immediately known to the people who will ultimately be responsible for paying those bills.

That’s because when a Mercury reporter arrived at the meeting Tuesday, he was ejected, literally with a wave of the hand, by Borough Manager Mark Flanders.

Flanders, who by virtue of his position is also the Borough Authority manager, asked the group if this was “a public meeting or a staff meeting.”

Stephen Kalis, the solicitor for the Lower Pottsgrove Borough Authority, was the only person to reply.

He said “it was not my understanding that this was a public meeting.”

“Goodbye,” Flanders said turning to the reporter.

Asked for a rationale for closing the meeting to the public, Flanders replied, “it’s not an advertised public meeting. It’s a staff meeting.”

Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and a recognized expert on Pennsylvania’s Open Meetings Law, said Flanders was within his rights to exclude the public.

Without a quorum of elected or appointed officials — only two members of the authority board, Chairman Tom Carroll and member David Renn were immediately evident — the law does not require that the meeting be open to the public, she said.

“However, there is also nothing in the law that says it can’t be open to the public,” Melewsky said.

“Whether or not you make a meeting public or not is purely discretionary,” Melewsky said. “Even holding an executive session” — a portion of a public meeting which can be closed to the public for specific reasons outlined in the law — “is in most cases discretionary.”

“The law says you can close a meeting to the public without a quorum, it doesn’t say you have to,” she said.

“It certainly seems like the topic of this meeting is of interest to the public, since public monies are being discussed, and there is nothing in the law that required that this meeting be closed to the public,” Melewsky said.

Pottstown’s sewer budget for 2013, which was adopted in November by Pottstown Borough Council, calls for spending $8 million. That budget did not raise rates over the previous year for borough residents.

However, the townships adopt their own sewer rates which vary widely and cover not only the costs to send sewage to the treatment plant, and their share of the capital costs there, but also for the maintenance and upgrading of their own piping and distribution systems.

Township Manager Rod Hawthorne said the money will be used to help fund capital improvements to the system, including those improvements to the wastewater treatment plant in Pottstown for which Lower Pottsgrove is partially responsible.

The amount of money Lower Pottsgrove paid to the borough authority for capital costs at the sewer plant for 2013, approved on Feb. 11, was $411,613, all generated by fees charged to sewer customers in Lower Pottsgrove.

The possibility that the townships might want to re-negotiate their service agreements with the borough authority was raised at the March 19 borough authority meeting.

That possibility elicited a one-word answer from Renn — “no.”

In addition to seeking a “seat at the table,” the three Pottsgroves are also seeking “a third-party overview of the borough’s wastewater treatment plant and financial billing issues.”

Additionally, Lower Pottsgrove has paid Bursich Associates, its engineer, $5,000 to conduct a comparative study of “other treatment plants about the same size as Pottstown’s.”

Whether any and all of these subjects were discussed during Tuesday’s joint meeting remains known only to those public officials allowed to attend the meeting from which the public was barred.